On Facebook, are you a grumpy know-it-all who disagrees with people, or an extrovert who lets everyone know what you’re up to?

If you’re not sure, don’t fret - a web tool now lets you see just what your status updates reveal about your personality.

The intuitive site analyses words from your posts to show you what sort of person you are, and then compares your traits with friends and celebrities.

San Francisco company Five has revealed a tool for Facebook that analyses your personality based on the words you have used in status updates. It gives scores in five areas: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness, and then compares this to your friends and celebrities

The tool is called Five Labs and predicts users’ personalities based on their Facebook posts.

COULD YOUR FINGERPRINT REVEAL YOUR PERSONALITY?

A group of university professors recently unveiled a scanner they believe can detect the perfect job for anyone - simply by looking at their fingerprints.

While the science remains in contention, the group claim that in the future, fingerprints could help reveal key personality traits.

The new biometric test was used at a careers convention in Krasnodar, a city in southwestern Russia.

To use the scanner, people place their fingers upon the fingerprint reader and computer technology linked up to sensors reads back what sort of work would suit the individual.

It was built as a demonstration of how today’s public social networks can analyse user content, according to the company.

Five Labs, based in San Francisco, examines the linguistic content of Facebook wall posts, pulling key words to make assumptions about individual personalities.

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Users can compare these traits to their friends', as well as public figures such as President Barack Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The tool uses an artificial intelligence method designed by Dr Hansen Andrew Schwartz, a lead researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Worldwide Well-Being Project, and an advisor to Five.

The application’s predictions are based around the Big Five personality traits: the leading personality theory in modern psychology.

According to the theory, personality is based on five characteristics - extraversion, openness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.

Using the web tool you can see what personality traits you have. In this image it can be seen that President Barack Obama is quite extraverted, but not too compassionate or cooperative. He is, however, very organised and has a great degree of intellectual curiosity, according to Five Labs

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has quite a different personality to the so-called most powerful man in the world. Zuckerberg is much more willing to cooperate than Obama but prefers to keep himself to himself. He is very open to new ideas but also experiences unpleasant emotions like anger more frequently

Five’s co-founder Nikita Bier said that the application is meant to hold a mirror to the growing trend of social applications mining data from user content.

In a bid to capitalise off of its immense stores of social data, Facebook recently founded a research laboratory in New York City.

Similarly, Google has acquired an artificial intelligence company DeepMind this past January.

The goal of Facebook’s lab is apparently to extract as much physchological meaning as it can from user content, said Five.

But while Five Labs employs similar techniques, it does not store the information, discarding information once it has been viewed.

‘Think of this as a personality snapshot,’ says Bier. ‘It’s all for fun, but we’re also hoping to educate.

‘People need to ask themselves a profound question: “how does my data portray me on public networks - and how might that be used?”’